Humans are visual beings in nature. Moreover, most people tend to absorb and react to visual information faster and more effectively than words.
That said, visuals are essential to creating content that can help your business stand out and draw in an audience. Visuals can help make text-centric content more digestible, readable, and memorable, and it also allows you to craft a compelling message that speaks volumes without using a single word.
This is why visual content marketing has become one of the most valuable tools for digital marketers. However, simply throwing together words and visuals doesn’t guarantee marketing success. You’ll need a visual content strategy to bring your content to life.
Likewise, you can partner with a reputable design agency to help with your visual marketing campaign. If you have established a business in the UK and are looking for a reliable design agency in Bristol, you can find the perfect match at Sortlist. It’s a reliable marketplace connecting businesses with their suitable partners.
Here are seven steps to creating a visual content strategy.
Determine Brand Goals
First off, you want to think about your goals. You can ask yourself: Why do you want to use visuals in your content marketing? How can it help your marketing campaign? What’s your goal with your visuals?
Possible answers may be to:
- Increase engagement
- Educate readers
- Bring more leads
- Enhance your service
- Promote brand
The clearer your goal is, the easier it is to develop the right ideas.
Think about Your Audience
Other than your goals, you also want to consider your audience. Ask yourself: Who’s going to see your visuals? What level of knowledge about your brand do they have? What kind of content do they like?
Research your audience, segment them, and develop the ideal customer personas.
Choose Channels
Even if you have the most visually-enticing content, it’s useless if no one sees it. Fortunately, you are exposed to more distribution channels than ever before. These may include channels you already own, such as your website, email, blog, and social media accounts.
You can determine the best channels for distributing your visual content based on your audience research. Identify the answer to the question: Where does your audience hang out?
Also, it would help if you consider the content formats that the platform supports to create visual content accordingly.
Start Listing Visual Content Ideas
Once you have your goals, audience, and channels in place, the next step is pitching ideas.
You want to write a creative brief with your team to ensure everyone is on the same page during brainstorming. Every idea generated should achieve the objectives designated in the creative brief. Make sure to examine each idea.
The following questions can be used as your guide: Does it fit your brand and goals? Will it be interesting to your audience? What unique value can it provide? Can it be distributed effectively? How original is it?
Create a Calendar
Once you have enough ideas for your visual content marketing, the next step is creating an editorial content calendar. This should help you stay on track with your visual content strategy. Being consistent is one of the key aspects of launching a successful visual content marketing campaign.
Ideally, your visual content marketing calendar should include:
- Different visual content types and their goals
- Personas you’re targeting
- Distribution medium
- Call to action (CTA) for every piece of visual content
Start Distributing
Once you have a calendar, it’s time to create your visual content and distribute them in front of the right eyes.
When creating your visual content, always prioritize quality over quantity. Ensure that you have the right talents and tools to produce the highest quality for your visual content. Moreover, make sure to follow content distribution best practices across the board. Use the right keywords, optimize your content for SEO, post at the right time, and more.
Measure the Results
Once your visual contents are posted, you want to take a closer look at how they’re doing. Tracking your visual content marketing metrics allows you to find gaps and holes in your campaign and make the necessary adjustments.
The metrics you need to track will depend on your objectives and goals. However, the most common metrics monitored include website traffic, conversion rate, lead generation rate, and social media engagement.
Measure your metrics every month and change your strategy to maximize the return of investment (ROI) over time.
Conclusion
Visual content marketing isn’t just about finding appealing pictures to put on your blog posts or uploading infographics and videos on your social business accounts. It would be best to have a solid strategy for enhancing your content visually.
With a well-defined process, you’ll spend less time creating visual content and get better results with your campaign, providing you an overall advantage over your competitors.
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